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Many people are able to recognize the personality traits of the person they are talking to by their facial features. Experts in non-verbal communication can do this even with a photograph. But is it possible to teach artificial intelligence to do the same?

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world have faced an unprecedented crisis. The cataclysm has impacted Russia as well. Who will better deal the hardships—experienced baby boomers, Gen Xers who survived the 1990s, or Gen Yers who have had an easy life?

In lockdowns, why do some people stay home, while others violate the quarantine rules and go out for picnics in the park? Behavioural economics may provide the answer to this question. Oksana Zinchenko, a Research Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, explains how we can predict people’s behaviour with game theory.

Article

Where Soviet and neoliberal discourses meet: the transformation of the purposes of higher education in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia

This paper studies transformations in the role of higher education in Russia as represented in official Soviet and post-Soviet policy documents between the 1950s and 2013. The focus is on the categories defining the purposes and tasks of higher education in the larger context of society and economy. There is a basic dichotomy in relation to the purposes and role of higher education, between vocational training (which is seen as a determining factor in the economic development) and personal development/education (seen as a condition of social development). The balance of these two poles, economic instrumentalism and social instrumentalism, changes throughout the history. The Soviet documents emphasized the importance of both, with the predominance of the social instrumentalism. The transitional period of the late 1980s and early 1990s is characterized by increasing humanistic discourse in regard to higher education. Later post-Soviet documents, reflecting neoliberal policies, largely abandon social instrumentalism and more exclusively promote the economic role of higher education. Economic instrumentalism is the meeting point of two historical eras, with their respective ideologies and political agendas. Connecting Soviet and neoliberal discourses highlights the importance of historical legacies in regard to the economic, applied nature of higher education, and underlines the crucial role of the state, which facilitated acceptance of neoliberal agendas in Russian society. The analysis also contributes to further understanding of the nature of the neoliberal reforms globally and in post-socialist countries.

The issue of how Russian students combine work and study can be analyzed through the quality of university, the quality of students and a number of financial, academic, social and demographic factors. These factors may have an effect on student employment and student labor supply, and help shed light on what motivates students to enter the labor market. We discovered that 64.7% of Russian students combined study and work and most of them begin working during their 3 rd year of study. Our results indicate that factors associated with the quality of students, such as studying in a top university and participating in research activities, positively affect the probability of student employment, but negatively affect the labor supply. Financial motivations for student employment are also significant. However, we found no evidence that combining study and work affects students’ academic achievements.

Bridging the gap between higher education research and policy making was always a challenge, but the recent calls for more evidence-based policies have opened a window of unprecedented opportunity for researchers to bring more contributions to shaping the future of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Encouraged by the success of the 2011 first edition, Romania and Armenia have organised a 2nd edition of the Future of Higher Education – Bologna Process Researchers’ Conference (FOHE-BPRC) in November 2014, with the support of the Italian Presidency of the European Union and as part of the official EHEA agenda. Reuniting over 170 researchers from more than 30 countries, the event was a forum to debate the trends and challenges faced by higher education today and look at the future of European cooperation in higher education. The research volumes offer unique insights regarding the state of affairs of European higher education and research, as well as forward-looking policy proposals. More than 50 articles focus on essential themes in higher education: Internationalization of higher education; Financing and governance; Excellence and the diversification of missions; Teaching, learning and student engagement; Equity and the social dimension of higher education; Education, research and innovation; Quality assurance, The impacts of the Bologna Process on the EHEA and beyond and Evidence-based policies in higher education.

Student friendship networks can be considered as social capital, which is known to be a very useful resource during university and after it. Several empirical studies have examined static models of student behaviour in social networks. In this study we analyse the dynamic changes of student social connections. We use original longitude data of student social ties from one Russian university. Data was collected within the framework of a research project of the International Research Laboratory for Institutional Analysis of Economic Reforms. To investigate factors influencing the evolution of social ties during university probit regressions were tested. We found that students with similar characteristics such as gender and academic achievement are more likely to become friends and continue to be friends. Both studying in the same group and living in a dormitory increase the likelihood of being friends. We also found a transitivity effect. We observe a positive effect of having common friend on friendship ties. We also notice a positive link between reciprocity and friendship stability.

The paper explores the relation between the degree of competition between higher education institutions (HEIs) and efficiency of regional higher education systems taking the evidence from the Russian Federation. The choice of regional system of higher education as a unit of analysis explained by features of the Russian system of higher education, especially by “closeness” in borders of regions. Using data envelopment analysis (DEA) we investigate the efficiency of higher education systems in the regions and juxtapose the results with the extent of higher education competition within them. The analysis finds that within the overall sample the correlation is positive, but not striking. Yet, the extent of competition is connected with the efficiency of the regional sets of HEIs more in the regions that are less developed socio-economically.

The paper discusses the development of the organizational practices in a Russian university under the influence of the environment. In the latter, the key factors are legislation and regulations of the Ministry of education and science. This influence is ambiguous and varies in different aspects, so to understand combined effect one needs detailed analysis using purposebuilt tools. The paper introduces such tool based on ideas of business model canvas by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur and organizational design theory by Henry Mintzberg. This instrument makes it possible to conduct a system analysis of the organizational design of the university, the integrity of this design and its fit to the environmental conditions. In particular, this analysis shows, how the system of restrictions and stimuli, created by the Ministry of education and science leads to the degradation of education quality in a classic university

The main reason the so-called "crisis of education" covers not only the rap-id changes in the system of knowledge and technology, but also the changes in the labor market, the prevalence of atypical employment. As a result, the univer-sity, by definition, can not train a specialist, fully satisfying the requirements of the employer. For example, the direction of "Advertising and public relations" proposes measures to resolve the existing contradictions.

In this paper, we discuss the methods of endowment management existing in the world and their applicability to the Russian university system. The endowment spending research focuses on the following issues: reinvesting endowment income; identifying the size of expendable endowment income; using the endowment body, not onlyincome; choosing endowment spending policy, rule and rate endowments, etc. We provide an overview of endowment fund financial indicators and endowment spending allocationin Russia. Based on the example of the HSE Endowment Fund, we analyze the use of endowment spending rulesand model of financial indicators for 2008–2014. The University’s Endowment Fund endowment spending policies implement the preservation principle, which may be reasonable in a stable economy. However, the viability of the principle is questionable in the crisis, the more so since the endowment is mostly in rubles. Using net asset valuation methods, the HSE Endowment Fund could provide equity betweengenerations with annual distribution of income in favor of the next and current generations.

In conditions, when the era of the classical University is coming to an end, as his successor acts as a research University, which many experts believe is a promising form of optimization of the whole system of higher professional education, allowing a more efficient use of the finances without sacrificing quality of services. The Chapter examines the development trajectory of a research University.

Clothing and fashion play significant role in the process of ageing, and help put bodily experiences in the context of culture. It is especially important for young people as social subjects, who are starting to become independent but do not have sufficient experience and social competences to do this. This paper explores how youth of middle and working class in Russia use clothing to denote their social identity and construct boundaries.The paper is based on materials of 81 IDI with young people from St. Petersburg.

In 2006, Russia amended its competition law and added the concepts of ‘collective dominance’ and its abuse. This was seen as an attempt to address the common problem of ‘conscious parallelism’ among firms in concentrated industries. Critics feared that the enforcement of this provision would become tantamount to government regulation of prices. In this paper we examine the enforcement experience to date, looking especially closely at sanctions imposed on firms in the oil industry. Some difficulties and complications experienced in enforcement are analysed, and some alternative strategies for addressing anticompetitive behaviour in concentrated industries discussed.

This research focuses on estimating the signalling role of education on the Russian labour market. Two well-known screening hypotheses are initially considered. According to first of these, education is an ideal filter of persons with low productivity: education does not increase the productivity of a person, but it does give him the possibility to signal about his innate productivity via an educational certicate. The second of these hypotheses admits that productivity actually does increase during the period of study, but nevertheless the main objective of getting an education is to acquire a signal about one's productivity. Information theory suggests that employees use education signals during the hiring processes whereby employers screen potential employees. Employers and other categories of self-employed workers are usually not screened by the labour market via their educational attainments. Comparison of the returns to education of employees vs. self-employed workers could show the difference between the returns to signals and the returns to human capital. Yet another way to understand the signals is to consider the time dynamics of the returns to education for employees staying in the same firm. This helps us to answer the question about whether the signals are valuable only during the hiring process, or whether they remain valuable during the whole experience with the firm. This research is based on the Mincerian-type earnings functions, estimated on RLMS-HSE and NOBUS data. On the basis of the available information, we cannot say that the returns to signals and human capital differ significantly in Russia. Nevertheless we can say that, for the majority of men, the return to educational signals decreases with time spent in the same firm, while we observe the opposite for women.

This article is talking about state management and cultural policy, their nature and content in term of the new tendency - development of postindustrial society. It mentioned here, that at the moment cultural policy is the base of regional political activity and that regions can get strong competitive advantage if they are able to implement cultural policy successfully. All these trends can produce elements of new economic development.